What good is EXAMPLE without its .com?
It’s one of these cases that makes one scratch their head in amazement.
When you spend thousands of dollars to secure a trademark in several classes, spanning hundreds of different items and objects, not to mention thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees, what good is all that if you’ll never be able to get the matching .com?
No, the owner of the .com isn’t waiting for some exuberant offer in order to sell, because it’s a fundamental domain for testing on the Internet.
Example.com is reserved by IANA, along with its .org counterpart, and are not available for registration or transfer:
“As described in RFC 2606 and RFC 6761, a number of domains such as example.com and example.org for documentation purposes. These domains may be used as illustrative examples in documents without prior coordination with us. They are not available for registration or transfer.”
And yet, the applicant of the trademark EXAMPLE had to push for its registration over the course of two years; initial refusals and “final decisions” were sent to reconsideration.
The trademark EXAMPLE has been approved, and will be published in the official gazette of the USPTO on March 24th.
It’s a shame they will never ever get the .com.
DG, let’s see if it’s truly reserved or if it’s “reserved” like CM.com, do you remember the weird case?, which was “justified” with an even weirder court order … 🙂
Andrea – CM wasn’t reserved, it was ‘reclaimed’. And yes, that’s an interesting story.
DG, CM.com was defined as “reserved domain” by ICANN in their official reply to our inquiry.
That’s why I used the term “reserved”, even if the story actually looks quite … “different” … 🙂
Andrea – The domain was repossessed, so not quite the same. Whether that repossession was legit to begin with, that’s a different story. 😉